Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is Best Picture favourite for 2013 Oscars, but Ben Affleck’s Argo or Ang Lee’s Life of Pi threaten an upset.

Daniel Day-Lewis is widely expected to win his third Best Actor Oscar for portraying America’s most beloved president in Lincoln. And Sally Field, who played the president's moody wife, is nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

Traditionally by this stage of awards season, Oscar watchers have to fend off boredom by looking for surprises that aren’t likely to happen.

Not this year. With the Feb. 24 Academy Awards ceremony fast approaching, the crystal ball is cloudy, the tea leaves are stewed and the pundits are perplexed. Expect the unexpected in what is shaping up to be the weirdest Oscars ever.

Most of the usual indicators for glory haven’t pointed a clear path. Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is by rights the film to beat for Best Picture, being a pedigreed presidential biopic with a leading 12 nominations. It’s Academy manna.

But Ben Affleck’s scrappy Argo has been steadily amassing hardware during this season of gold, winning top honours at the Critics’ Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, the Producers Guild of America (PGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). It has momentum, and could certainly take Best Picture, but it lacks the additional nom for Best Director that is usually required for Oscar victory.

And Best Picture isn’t the only Oscar category in disarray. Here’s the current state of the race for the top eight categories:

BEST PICTURE

Somewhere along Lincoln’s presumed march to Oscar glory, a different kind of emancipation happened.

All those Best Picture votes that were supposedly locked up by Lincoln’s 12 nominations, prestigious production, and accompanying director and acting bounty have suddenly been freed by Argo’s come-from-behind surge.

History insists the Iranian rescue caper Argo isn’t likely to win: only three times in Oscar’s 85 years has a movie without an accompanying Best Director nod taken the Academy’s top prize. The last time was for Driving Miss Daisy in 1990.

Yet many sensible people think Argo is now unstoppable, and a case can also be made for Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, which is right behind Lincoln with 11 nominations. David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, meanwhile, has just eight nods but four are for actors, a very rare combination that could be catnip for the actor-dominated Academy.

This is the strangest category of all this year. For decades, Oscar’s Best Director was in lockstep with the DGA’s five picks, and the top choice of both groups also pointed to the film that would win Best Picture.

Such certainty has slipped in recent years, and this year it went right off the rails. Just two of the DGA’s nominations for directing excellence, Spielberg and Lee, have been repeated in the matching Oscar category.

The DGA’s other three choices are Hooper, Affleck and Bigelow; Oscar’s other three are Russell, Haneke and Zeitlin.

It’s entirely possible that the DGA will honour Affleck over Spielberg this weekend, choosing the relative rookie over the established veteran and making the Oscar outcome an even bigger guessing game.

BEST ACTOR

In a year of uncertainty, this is one of the few sure things, and it’s as solid as the Lincoln Memorial.

Daniel Day-Lewis is going to win his third Best Actor Oscar for portraying America’s most beloved president, as all precursor awards and signs indicate. He will become Oscar’s first three-time Best Actor winner, deservedly so.

Of the remaining four nominees — Denzel Washington (Flight), Hugh Jackman (Les Misérables), Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook) and Joaquin Phoenix (The Master) — only Washington and Jackman are considered serious threats to Day-Lewis. And they aren’t likely to win.

BEST ACTRESS

The five choices here range from the youngest-ever Best Actress nominee, 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild) to the oldest-ever Best Actress nominee, 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva (Amour). That span also covers a whole lot of possibilities.

The leading contender is currently Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), who took SAG’s Best Actress prize last week, often an indicator of an eventual Oscar win. But Lawrence has strong competition from Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty), who got the drama trophy to Lawrence’s comedy one at the Golden Globes.

Both could be overturned by Riva, who turns 86 on Oscar day and whose emphatic performance as a stroke victim in Amour helped gain an impressive five nominations for this Parisian late-life love story.

And while it’s unlikely young Wallis will score an upset, another actress nominated for a film about rising waters could do so: Naomi Watts of tsunami drama The Impossible may pull off a miracle if votes split.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Conventional wisdom had it early on that Tommy Lee Jones would simply walk to get his second Best Supporting Actor trophy, thanks to his fiery portrayal of a slippery anti-slavery politician in Lincoln.

But as one awards group after another looked beyond Jones for their supporting actor champ, his grip on the Oscar seemed to weaken. It strengthened again with last’s weekend’s SAG win, but his failure to appear and make a speech — he was reportedly felled by the flu — won’t help the cause.

Meanwhile, Jones has very strong rivals: Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Master), who seemed unbeatable at TIFF; and the popular Robert De Niro (Silver Linings Playbook), who may be the fallback choice for voters seeking to slip SLP a little gold.

You also can’t count out Alan Arkin (Argo) or Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained). All five nominees have previously won Oscars, so they all presumably have strong Academy support.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

The only other take-it-to-the-bank choice in the top eight Oscar categories this year is Anne Hathaway, for her turn as the scorned and suffering single mother in Les Misérables. She’s the one undeniable shining star in a blockbuster musical that has earned much coin but not much critical acclaim.

Hathaway has taken all the precursor prizes, but right at her heels is Sally Field, whose portrayal of the president’s moody wife in Lincoln garnered many raves. An upset on Oscar night is possible, and it would give Field, a previous two-time winner, the chance to repeat her “You really like me!” speech.

It’s really between these two women. Also in the race, but not in serious contention, are Helen Hunt (TheSessions), Amy Adams (The Master) and Jacki Weaver (Silver Linings Playbook).

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

The top three contenders are also Best Picture nominees with extra appeal: Amour, by Austria’s Michael Haneke, was the 2012 Palme d’Or winner at Cannes; Zero Dark Thirty, by Mark Boal, follows his 2010 Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay winner The Hurt Locker; and Django Unchained, by Quentin Tarantino, is a major box-office hit for the man who won this category in 1995 for Pulp Fiction.

Any of the three has a chance, and not too far behind are Moonrise Kingdom, by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, and Flight by John Gatins.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Oscar likes true-life stories in this category, especially when they have the ring of history. Tony Kushner’s Lincoln certainly does, distilling the words and wisdom of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best-selling Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

You’d want to place your bets on Lincoln, but once again, Argo proves a major threat to its fellow Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay contender. Chris Terrio’s screenplay, drawn from a Wired magazine article, may not have served strict historical fact, but it struck a chord with moviegoers.

The other three contenders are all also Best Picture nominees: David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, David Magee’s Life of Pi, and Lucy Alibar’s and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. They each have a chance, but this looks like another slugfest between Lincoln and Argo.

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